San Francisco 49ers: Anthony Davis and the Offensive Line's Recent Struggles

There are many reasons the San Francisco 49ers lost to the Denver Broncos on Sunday.  The Broncos are the superior team.  The game was played in Denver, rather than in San Francisco or at a neutral site.  The 49ers were coming off a short week.  The 49ers were missing at least six projected starters.  The list goes on.

One of the biggest reasons, though, was Denver’s ability to constantly get pressure on Colin Kaepernick.  The offensive line has had a so-so start to this season, and it was missing Mike Iupati to start the game.  To make things worse, injuries hit during the contest, with both centers Daniel Kilgore and Dillon Farrell having to leave the game.  The result was the Denver defense teeing off on Kaepernick all night long.

Position	Player	Sacks	Hits	Hurries
LT	Joe Staley	3	0	3
RT	Anthony Davis	1	1	2
HB	Frank Gore	1	0	1
QB	Colin Kaepernick	1	0	0
LG	Joe Looney	0	1	5
C	Daniel Kilgore	0	0	2
C	Dillon Farrell	0	0	1
RG	Alex Boone	0	0	1
TE	Vernon Davis	0	0	1
RT	Jonathan Martin	0	0	1

All night long, the 49ers struggled dealing with the likes of Sylvester Williams, DeMarcus Ware, Von Miller, Brandon Marshall and Malik Jackson.  Miller, of course, was the star of the show, constantly in the backfield to disrupt plays before they could really get going.

Part of this we can blame on the injuries the team fought through and the shuffling of the line.  By the end of the game, the 49ers had only five healthy linemen, including no centers—they ended the game with Joe Looney snapping the ball.  Kilgore will have season-ending surgery, compounding the issues, according to Ron Kroichick of the San Francisco Chronicle.

I suppose if there’s a good time to lose your starting center, it’s before the bye week.  Marcus Martin, the third-round pick from USC, is finally healthy and has been practicing.  He’ll now have two full weeks to get into a rhythm with Kaepernick and then there's a home game against the St. Louis Rams.  Barring a full preseason, that’s the smoothest way to get into the starting lineup.

The problem is, it was the line as a unit that struggled on Sunday night, not just the injury replacements.  With the exception of Alex Boone, whose one-hurry night represents his best game of the season so far, none of the offensive line really covered themselves with glory against Denver.

Take a look at this DeMarcus Ware sack on San Francisco’s third play from scrimmage:

Credit: NFL Game Rewind

Credit: NFL Game Rewind

Anthony Davis at right tackle simply cannot keep up with the speed rush of Miller, who comes crashing around the outside to force Kaepernick to step up.  That steps him right into Ware, who forces left tackle Joe Staley into a spin as he cleans up the play.  Neither of these are precisely how you draw up a protection scheme in practice.

Credit: NFL Game Rewind

Even if Ware had not been there, you had Brandon Marshall bursting through the middle, right past Joe Looney and Frank Gore.  The play had no chance—only Daniel Kilgore really succeeds at a block here.  It’s just a disaster from front to back.

To be fair to Davis, Miller is a very hard draw for your first full game back from injury.  Davis had trouble with Miller on multiple occasions.  This shot is from an incomplete pass with 5:22 to go in the first quarter:

Credit: NFL Game Rewind

Davis actually has decent coverage here, but Miller is free enough to stop Kaepernick from stepping through that gap between Boone and Davis, which would have allowed him to scramble for at least five or six yards.  Instead, we have Kaepernick scrambling out of trouble, like he was all night, and throwing an incomplete pass.

Miller again made an impact with a key sack at the beginning of the second quarter, with the game still somewhat in doubt:

Credit: NFL Game Rewind

Miller bursts through a gap between Staley and Looney, shrugs off a Frank Gore chip block, and he absolutely swallows up Kaepernick. 

It’s generally not good when you have defenders between your quarterback and your offensive line—the hole was so wide that I thought at first it was a screen pass, designed to sucker Miller in while the play went another way.  Stopping Miller with a running back, even one as good as Gore, is not a recipe for long-term success.

We could break the entire game down like this, as play after play, the 49ers struggled to slow the Broncos defense down.

There are mitigating factors, of course.  With the way the game was going, the 49ers had to abandon the run early to try to keep up with Peyton Manning’s passing prowess—they only ran 18 times in the game, and threw 46 passes.  That means the Broncos could tee off on Kaepernick, without any of the cushion usually provided by needing to respect the run or play-action fakes.

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

There’s also the injury factors—asking Davis to block Miller having only played a handful of snaps this season was perhaps too much.  Similarly, asking Looney to play a key role against the Super Bowl favorites is not a plan for long-term success.

Then you have the steamroll factor—when a team starts getting beat on every play, it often can devolve into a sloppy game as players get demoralized and drained.  That’s not a good thing, but it happens.  That doesn’t mean the 49ers will be this bad after the bye week—they’ll be able to start with a fresh slate in two weeks.

It is a cause for concern, however.  If the 49ers can’t handle the Broncos, how will they fare in two games against the Seattle Seahawks?  Washington and the New York Giants also have had very solid pass rushes to this point in the season; how will the 49ers be able to handle those?

In the end, I think you can chalk this one up as a bit of an aberration, considering all the factors working against the 49ers.  You can also point out that they handled the pass rushes of Dallas, Kansas City and Philadelphia just fine—they’re not a great pass-blocking team this year, but they’ve been alright often enough to move past that.

The team just needs to get healthy and hope Marcus Martin lives up to his predraft hype.  If he does, and the team gets clicking, I think the offensive line will be fine in the long run.

Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers.  Follow him @BryKno on Twitter.